Word: burtness
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...Carrera plays a prostitute shanghaied from Panama to Moreau's Pacific island for his grisly experiments in trans-species engineering. Michael York co-stars as a shipwrecked Englishman who also gets entangled in the mad scientist's endeavors. To provide raw materials for Vivisectionist Moreau (played by Burt Lancaster), the film makers imported a small-scale Noah's ark of creatures. So far, actors and animals are getting along famously. In fact, whenever the cast takes time out for body surfing, they are joined by an athletic brown bear...
When Bogdanovich is concentrating on atmosphere, showing a small independent company making up stories in order to take advantage of the locations, or fighting off gunmen sent out by the competition, his picture has a pleasant authenticity. There is also a nicely handled romantic triangle involving O'Neal, Burt Reynolds as a star and Newcomer Jane Hitchcock as a comically nearsighted actress. What goes wrong with the picture is an overreliance on slapstick, the nearly lost silent film technique, as a device to evoke the spirit of the time. Bogdanovich apparently does not quite trust his film...
...best, Burt's methods were incredibly sloppy. The raw test sheets on the twin studies were among papers stuffed into half a dozen tea chests and later destroyed. Many of his professional articles do not give primary data, referring readers to unpublished reports. Some of those reports, says Kamin, are at least as hard to find as are Howard and Conway...
...Burt's work go unchallenged during his lifetime? Says Philip Vernon, a collaborator of Burt's now at Alberta's University of Calgary: "There were certainly grave doubts, although nobody dared to put them into print because Burt was so powerful." In fact, he was powerful enough to see his ideas on heredity and intelligence translated into educational policy. As a government adviser in the 1940s, he played a prominent role in setting up the three-tier British school system that pigeonholed students on the basis of an IQ test given at age eleven...
That system has since been dismantled, and the controversy over Burt is unlikely to have much effect on educational policy. It will also make little impact on American psychologists who believe that heredity is crucial to intelligence; they have produced several twin studies similar to Burt's. Says Herrnstein, "I know of no correlation of Burt's which is seriously challenged in the literature." But Harvard's Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist, says that Burt's work with twins "is the only large study which is methodologically correct, so its loss is no trivial problem...